The SevOne team was in our lab in RTP for two days, where they went through intensive test review of their product against a purpose built medianet-enabled network. SevOne PASTM provides support to medianet performance monitor that has been discussed in previous blogs.

Performance monitor collects performance statistics including loss, delay and jitter at the network elements. This approach provides the most extensive visibility because all the flows between video source and sink must go through the network infrastructure. It also eliminates the need for expensive probes which would lead to increased costs for data collection and operational expense.

LiveAction 2.2 support for medianet has been covered in our previous blogs: performancemonitor as well asIPSLAVideoOperations. However; with the the CDN program, the LiveAction 2.2 software has formally worked through an intensive test review against a purpose built medianet-enabled network.

Performancemonitor collects performance statistics including loss, delay and jitter at the network elements. This approach provides the most extensive visibility because all the flows between video source and sink must go through the network infrastructure. It also eliminates the need for expensive probes, which could lead to increased costs for data collection and operational expense.

In a previous blog, we discussed medianet performance monitor and how it can provide greater confidence within the network with its ability to analyze voice, video and data traffic and report on loss, latency and jitter.

Plixer International delivers a complementary solution that supports the medianet performance monitor feature through the medianet Cisco Developer Network (CDN) program. CDN for medianet systems management offers application programming interfaces (APIs) and documentation to enable network and application management vendors to support enterprise medianet features that offer customers a range of management and operation solutions.

Finally it’s here. Cisco has been working on integrating the Media Services Interface (MSI) into the WebEx Meeting Client.

For those unfamiliar with the MSI, it’s an SDK developed to enable applications to interact with a Cisco Medianet. One of the long standing challenges IT organizations have faced has been to harmonize the needs of applications and endpoints with the network services required to meet those needs. It’s been a case of ships in the night as network administrators have done their best to deliver services while having limited interaction with the endpoints and applications that leverage those services. Asking endpoints and applications to consistently implement all the networking protocols to enable them to leverage the network has often led to mixed results; inconsistent or incomplete protocol stack implementations led to interoperability issues with the burden usually falling on the end customer.

Last week, we introduced the new IP SLA Video Operation tool to assess the readiness of a network by generating synthetic traffic to mimic real applications. When you use IP SLA VO to generate simulated RTP traffic between two sites, you can use the medianet Performance Monitor feature to measure the performance of this synthetic traffic across the network. You can also use Mediatrace to discover the network elements on the paths between the two sites. For each network element discovered in the network path, Performance Monitor can collect metrics to detect potential capacity bottlenecks and proactively identify quality issues.

In addition to the obvious use for pre-deployment assessment, many enterprises understand that the network and applications are constantly changing so it is necessary to do continuous assessments. For example, after a major scheduled network maintenance or upgrade during non-business hours, you can use IP SLA VO to simulate real application traffic and assess the impact of the network changes to minimize potential business disruption or even downtime. Another example is prior to an important event, you can use IP SLA VO to stress test the network and verify that it can handle the rich media traffic without impacting existing application performance.

Whether you are doing an initial assessment for a new deployment, an expansion to an existing deployment, or ongoing operations, IPSLA VO, Performance Monitor and Mediatrace are effective tools to identify and proactively resolve rich media problems across the network. Put this handy tool in your toolbox and you will like it.

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